Microsoft's Power Platform Fundamentals

What is the Power Platform About?

The Power Platform is a suite of cloud-based, low-code tools and services you can use to build your own custom web applications, automate workflows, and analyze data.

Microsoft built this platform with a very important idea in mind, to enable both technical and non-technical people to create solutions tailored to their needs in a simple and efficient manner.

Key Components

As mentioned before, the Power Platform is composed of a wide range of tools and services. Let’s look at some of the most important ones:

Power Apps

Power Apps can be used to create custom web applications quickly and without the need to write complex code or build an entire infrastructure from scratch in the process. It includes a very simple user interface where you can drag and drop pre-built components as needed.

The main target of applications built with Power Apps is usually internal users. Providing companies with the capability of building automated workflows for self-service requests, reporting, enrollments to different initiatives and so on.

Power Apps offer a wide range of integrations that can be used for pretty much anything you can think of. From getting data from different data sources such as SharePoint and SQL Server to sending automated messages to communication platforms such as Teams and Slack. You can even create your own integrations from internal endpoints.

Power Pages

Power Pages are very similar to Power Apps except they usually serve a very different target, external users. This tool can be used to create customer-facing websites and portals, and one of its main advantages is that it offers pre-built templates for common and popular website layouts.

The user interface used to build your web application with this tool is very similar to the one Power Apps has, where you can drag and drop components as you wish.

Power Automate

Power Automate can be considered the “brain” of the Power Platform as it can be used to orchestrate different automation processes across a multitude of services and applications. Some of its advantages include:

1. Automation of workflows and repetitive tasks.
2. Data processing and storing for any service, including other components of the Power Platform.
3. Lots of available integrations with different services.
4. An intuitive code-like structure with the capability of decision making.

Power BI

If your company needs include reporting, then Power BI can help as it is Microsoft’s business analytics solution. You can use this tool to process, analyze, and display data however you like. But that is not limited to only displaying data, you can also create interactive dashboards so users can filter and drill down as much as they want to get the data they need.

You can even use this tool to combine data from different data sources and display it to users in a centralized place which can provide valuable insights to make data-driven decisions.

Adoption and Maintenance

One of the key advantages of the Power Platform is how easy it is to adopt and maintain. Its intuitive user interface coupled with the ease it provides while creating components are the key ingredients that enable all types of users to work with it seemingly.

In fact, we have started noticing a trend here at JBS where companies are adopting the Power Platform to modernize their portfolio with our help and then continue to maintain it by themselves without having to hire an entire IT department.

Of course, not everything can be perfect as the Power Platform has its limitations (especially when dealing with large amounts of data) that should be considered while planning the scope of a project for which it will be used. It is also necessary to consider that while it is a very good option for a lot of use cases, more complex scenarios where robustness, reliability and flexibility are of high importance may require a more technical solution like a dedicated infrastructure in a hosting service and a proven web development stack.

Conclusion

The Power Platform is a powerful set of tools that can enable teams that don’t necessarily have a lot of technical expertise to create tailored solutions to their needs with ease and quickly. It has a wide set of features that can be leveraged for very diverse use cases and scenarios. But as always, it is important to keep in mind how important it is to analyze in detail every requirement a project may have before starting it and try to decide whether the Power Platform may be a good fit for it or not.